EGD News #19

Hi there,

It’s Joakim here. Greetings from Helsinki!

Here’s our weekly Elite Game Developers newsletter. Let’s get going.

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Blog

​Pitch Your Games Company​— Our new online course on fundraising, Pitch Your Games Company, is live on the Elite Game Developers website. If you are looking to raise funding for your games startup and want to know what it’s all about, I suggest you take a look.

I wrote an article on what this new is about. In this article, I cover the facts on why I think online education is the way to coach and mentor these kinds of things and where I got the inspiration for the course.

​Growing a Games Company — Daniel Hasselberg is the Co-Founder and CEO of MAG Interactive, a mobile games company based in Stockholm, Sweden. I met Daniel several years ago when they had just launched their hit word game Ruzzle.

Since then, the company has IPOed and has been growing with more office locations and several launched games. We’ll now discuss the learnings from that journey with Daniel.

I’ve been fascinated with the remote work movement. We are continually getting better tools like Slack, Zoom, Notion, and Loom. The gaming space is also lighting up for remote, as fellow Finn Kristian Segerstråle from Super Evil Megacorp shares their guidelines for remote work.

​Stillfront has been an active acquirer of mobile gaming companies in the past six months. The notable deal was their acquisition of Storm8 for $300m.

Joseph Kim, with co-host Eric Kress, speaks to Alexis Bonte, Stillfront’s Group COO, about their acquisitions. What were the synergies? What was the diligence process like? Why did they do the deal? How did the deal come about? How was the deal structured? What are future expectations? Watch teh interview here.

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To me, it feels like the same strategy that Playtika, Zynga, Phoneix Games, and other active acquirers are going after. Long life-cycle, free-to-play games with long-lasting audiences. The competition for great studios is heating up.

I believe that her process of learning to build teams is something that many should be looking into. It’s so much understanding your people, and about creating a safe environment, self-expression and trust.

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Book Recommendation

​Stillness Is The Key (Ryan Holiday) — I love Ryan Holiday’s books. Here has an overarching theme to his books, which revolves around the Stoic philosophy. The main question that comes up is: what is enough?

In this book, Holiday covers stories from history. Leonardo da Vinci, Tiger Woods, Winston Churchill, Michael Jordan, John Kennedy. The stories of solitude, creativity, freedom, slavery, escapism. The stillness of the mind helps us, but why is it so hard to rest.